


Home

by erinmangerer



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:48:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26259655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erinmangerer/pseuds/erinmangerer
Summary: If 213 and 511 met . . . (aka how to fix those twenty years)This wee drabble is unedited- all mistakes are mine!
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 22
Kudos: 136





	Home

_But you are my home._

_And you are mine. But this home is lost._

She tried to convince herself it was not happening the whole way to Craigh Na Dun.

All their work. All their effort. All their _sacrifice._

And still, the battle came. The end was here. They hadn’t changed a bloody thing. 

And the one thing they had both wanted, ached for, longed for, had finally arrived too late. They would never be parents together. Jamie would do his duty, face his destiny at Culloden. Claire would return to Frank, as promised.

What then?

The sight of the stones, as it always did, stopped her in her tracks. The questions that tumbled over and over in her mind were like a tiny fall of pebbles that started a great avalanche. _How do I explain all this? How do I go back?_

How would she explain, to a man she had once loved, the uncontainable depth and breadth of her love for the man she was being forced to leave behind? How could she tell him where she had traveled, _when_ she had traveled, and expect him to understand? How could she look at him and not see the face that haunted her and Jamie’s nightmares? And how would he ever handle the idea of taking her back pregnant with the child of another man?

Frank. The baby. Frank. The baby. She tested it out as a mantra, desperately trying to latch onto an image of home without Jamie.

She tried to focus through the buzzing and instead found herself begging Jamie to try to come with her. Her mind knew the way was closed to him, that where she had to go, he could not follow. But her every breath was a searing agony, her tears burning as though they would leave permanent tracks in her skin. And oh, the touch of his lips, the grip of his hands, the press of his flesh against hers, home, home, home, agony and ecstasy all at once. 

_Blood of my blood._

_And bone of my bone._

_As long as we both shall live._

She gave him the amber from Hugh Munro. He gave her his father’s ring. Then he turned her, gripped her waist, and began walking her backwards. 

With every step, she felt as though the very beat of her heart was physically leaving her body. ( _I love you. I love you._ Did any other words exist?)

When she turned, the stone was right there. It was so close the buzzing was nearly a scream in her ears. She tried the mantra again, tried to conjure Frank’s face in her mind while Jamie’s hand reached with hers for the stone. 

_Goodbye, Claire._

Frank. The baby. Frank. The baby. Frank. The baby. 

But a split second before her hand touched the stone, she felt Jamie press his nose into her hair, filling his senses with her one more time. 

Then there was nothing but chaos. Her focus seemed to disintegrate along with the rest of her. The chasm on the other side of the standing stone was a world of screaming oblivion. It should have hurt less this time- after all, she had left her heart behind. Having one less piece of her to disassemble should have eased the passage. But if anything, it was worse. Her mind tried frantically to hold onto anything, any sense of self, any sense of reality. 

Home. She had to go home. It was time to go home. It was the only reality she could find.

The end of the journey was just as abrupt as the beginning. There was no warning, no gentle easing of the chaos into the end point. She just dropped. And as much as she didn’t want to try, she started to orient herself to her surroundings once more as she slowly blinked her eyes open. She felt the grass beneath her, cold still in April in the Highlands. The sun made her eyes hurt so she closed them again, briefly, tried to reach back for the black nothing of the void. She wished for it, for anything other than this gaping emptiness.

Then she heard a catch of breath from behind her. She was not alone.

“Sassenach?” Barely a whisper, from a voice choked with tears. Her mind had no opportunity to process before her body was lifted, held (nearly crushed) in a pair of strong arms, near a body that was warm and solid and decidedly male. There was a torrent of kisses rained over her face, her hair, punctuated with broken words in a language that her mind was struggling to place. 

“Claire? _Mo nighean donn_? Are ye alive?”

Was she? Her eyes had finally caught the vision of a shocking bit of red hair and things were starting to slowly fall back into place. Jamie. But if this were Jamie, then of course she couldn’t be alive. Jamie was not in the twentieth century. And if she had not made it back to the twentieth century, then she must be dead. No matter- it was just as Jamie had told her. He had found her. The Lord had allowed him to find her, and they could be together always. She shook her head, felt tears streaming from her eyes as she finally looked full in his beloved face. “I don’t think so. But it is alright- you are here, and so am I, and we will never be parted.”

He took her hand and brought it to cover his heart, leaned his forehead into hers. “Can ye feel that, Sassenach? I am alive, and you as well. Ye were gone, just as ye promised. I went to collect yer plaid, so I could carry one last piece of ye into battle. Then, ye were there, on the ground, laying before the stone.” 

She could feel her mouth opening and closing like a fish but could not stop it. She seemed to have lost all power of speech. “You . . . you’re saying . . . I’m . . .” 

Could it be? Had she traveled through the stones only to arrive right back where she started? Had that endless chasm only been a few minutes of actual time? _Was she here, alive, with him, carrying his child safe in her womb?_

“How . . . I don’t . . . Oh, JESUS H. ROOSEVELT CHRIST!” she shouted in frustration at her own inability to form a sentence. Chuckling now through his tears, Jamie crushed his lips to hers, and everything else faded to insignificance, as it always did. Home. This was home.

She sat straight up in his arms, breaking the kiss, and gasped. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth. “That’s it.”

“What, Sassenach? Ye ken what happened?”

“Home, Jamie. I felt you behind me, your nose in my hair, and that was my final thought before I touched the stone. Home. Don’t you see? I was trying to think about Frank, and the baby, to keep them fixed in my mind, but at the last moment I asked the stones to take me home. And they did.”

They both turned, just as they had earlier, toward the sound of cannon fire in the distance. Their plan may have faltered, but the battle was on. The verdict of history could not be changed.

To her utter shock, he tried to gather himself and said, “Ye must try again, quickly. I’ll no touch ye this time. I must see ye and the bairn safe, Sassenach.”

With an energy that stunned her given the tumult of the past hours, Claire shot to her feet and shouted, “NO! I cannot go through that again, Jamie. And I will not leave you. We tried. But I am meant to be with you, and you are meant to be with me. You know it, I know it, God knows it, and even these stones know it. And whether the time we have left together is seven hours or seventy years, I will not waste a single minute of it. Do you hear me, James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser? _I will never leave you again._ ”

He sat on the ground still, not moving, not speaking, just staring at her with wonder and even a tiny amount of fear. Finally, he shook his head in resignation and asked, “How in Christ’s name did ye get so brave, _mo graidh_?”

“Not brave. Stubborn, perhaps. But I have crossed the fabric of time today, Jamie, and yet here I still am. And right now I know- _I know_ \- that I am not going to lose you today.” Her whisky eyes blazed with certainty and Jamie wondered, for the thousandth time, if perhaps she really was a witch.

He pushed to his feet, held out his hand for hers, and said, “Then come, my own. I dinna ken how we are going to manage this, but it seems the way forward is together.”

She took his hand and said, “We have the entire ride back to figure it out.” She was afraid, but nothing could be worse than the endless night of separation from which they had just been saved. Then they walked away from Craigh Na Dun and went to face Culloden and the aftermath together. It seemed, despite everything, that home was not lost after all. 


End file.
